“We Need a New Manifesto,” Isabel Sobral Campos

In 1988, Ron Silliman, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, and other self-identified Language Poets wrote a manifesto elaborating on their aesthetic stance, one that they labeled as political: "Aesthetic Tendency and the Politics of Poetry: A Manifesto." Their position spelled out the inadequacies of expressivist poetics, which hoisted individual affects and perceptions as signs of an authentic, pure, and purifying expression that, because of its ‘internal' origin, elided its ideological underpinnings. In opposition to this, Language Poets attended to language as construction and dismantled utterances to highlight the ideological givens and the subject positions remaining unquestioningly within. My essay takes up the question of politics again in relation to poetry in our present moment of catastrophic violence on the world stage. The poetry written by Palestinian poets in response to Gaza is especially appropriate for thinking through this question. My essay begins with Mosab Abu Toha's poem "A Litany for 'One Land’,” a poem that rewrites Audre Lorde's "A Litany for Survival." Looking at litany as form, I examine how this poem and others draw on the indexical as Charles Sanders Peirce theorized it, and on the idea of the social gestic as Bertolt Brecht conceptualized it, to mediate between the bearing witness grounded in facts whose stability the current age of AI threatens and the artifice of poetic language.